Faced with an estimated 786 million hungry people in the world, cheerleaders for our social order have an easy solution: we will grow more food through the magic of chemicals and genetic engineering. Monsanto, Novartis, AgrEvo, DuPont, and other chemical companies who are reinventing themselves as biotechnology companies, together with the World Bank and other international agencies assert the world can be saved from hunger and starvation if we just allow these companies, spurred by the free market, to do their magic. For those who remember the original ´´Green Revolution'' promise to end hunger through miracle seeds, this call for ´´Green Revolution II'' should ring hollow.
Narrowly focusing on increasing production cannot alleviate hunger because it fails to alter the tightly concentrated distribution of economic power, especially access to land and purchasing power. Even the World Bank concluded in a major 1986 study that current world hunger can only be alleviated by ´´redistributing purchasing power and resources toward those who are undernourished,'' the study said. In a nutshell, if the poor don't have the money to buy food, increased production is not going to help them. Despite three decades of rapidly expanding global food supplies, there are still an estimated 786 million hungry people in the world. Roughly two-thirds of them live in Asia, precisely where Green Revolution seeds have contributed to the greatest production success. According to Business Week magazine, ´´even though Indian granaries are overflowing now, 5000 children die each day of malnutrition. One-third of India's 900 million people are poverty-stricken.'' Since the poor can't afford to buy what is produced, ´´the government is left trying to store millions of tons of foods.''
Whether the Green Revolution or any other strategy to boost food production will alleviate hunger depends on the economic, political, and cultural rules that determine who benefits as a supplier of the increased production and who benefits as a consumer of the increased production - who gets the food and at what price. The poor pay more and get less. Poor farmers can't afford to buy fertilizer and other inputs in volume, or hold out for the best price, like big growers whose circumstances are far less desperate. Government-subsidised credit overwhelmingly benefits the big farmers. Most of all, the poor lack clout. They can't command the subsidies and other government favors accruing to the rich.
Moreover, the Green Revolution makes farming petro-dependent. In India, adoption of the new seeds has been accompanied by a six fold rise in fertilizer use per acre. Yet the quantity of agricultural production per ton of fertilizer used in India dropped by two-thirds. In fact, over the past thirty years the annual growth of fertilizer use on Asian rice has been from three to forty times faster than the growth of rice yields. In the United States improved seeds combined with chemical fertilizers and pesticides have brought larger harvests which in turn pushed down the prices farmers get for their crops. Meanwhile the costs of farming have shot up, drastically narrowing farmers' profit margins. So who survives today? Two very different groups: those few farmers who chose not to buy into industrialised agriculture and those able to keep expanding their acreage to make up for their lower per acre profit. Among this second select group are the top 1.2 percent of farms by income, those with
$ 500,000 or more in yearly sales. In 1969, the superfarms earned 16 percent of net farm income; by the late 1980s, they garnered nearly 40 percent.
Over time, why should we expect the result of the cost-price squeeze to be any different in the Third World? The United States saw the number of farms drop by two-thirds and average farm size more than double since World
War II. The gutting of rural communities, the creation of inner-city slums, and the exacerbation of unemployment all followed in the wake of this vast migration from the land. Think what the equivalent rural exodus means in the Third World, where the number of jobless people is already double or triple that of the US. The only model with the potential to end rural poverty, feed everyone, and protect the environment and the productivity of the land for future generations is a viable and productive small farm agriculture using the principles of agroecology. From the United States to India, alternative agriculture is proving itself viable. In the United States, a landmark study by the prestigious National Research Council found that ´´alternative farmers often produce high per acre yields with significant reductions in costs per unit of crop harvested,'' despite the fact that ´´many federal policies discourage adoption of alternative practices.''
In the final analysis, if the history of the Green Revolution has taught us one thing, it is that increased food production can, and often does, go hand in hand with greater hunger. This is why we must be sceptical when Monsanto, DuPont, Novartis, and other chemical-
cum-biotechnology companies tell us that genetic engineering will boost crop yields and feed the hungry. The technologies they push have dubious benefits and well-documented risks, and the second Green Revolution they promise is no more likely to end hunger than the first.
Peter Rosset is co-director of Food First/The Institute for Food and Development Policy and co-author of "World Hunger: Twelve Myths" (Grove Press/Earthscan, 1998). (http://www.foodfirst.org).
Freitag, 07. Juli 2000